


watching you kiss her

by elegantstupidity



Category: Never Have I Ever (TV)
Genre: Developing Relationships, Friends With Benefits, Misuse of High School Debate Skills, Multi, Threesome Proposal
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-24
Updated: 2020-12-24
Packaged: 2021-03-11 02:00:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,480
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28127268
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elegantstupidity/pseuds/elegantstupidity
Summary: If Paxton had any expectations about what would happen when Devi pulled him into an empty classroom after school, they all hinged on the room actually being empty.
Relationships: Ben Gross/Devi Vishwakumar, Paxton Hall-Yoshida/Devi Vishwakumar
Comments: 6
Kudos: 35
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	watching you kiss her

**Author's Note:**

  * For [blithers](https://archiveofourown.org/users/blithers/gifts).



Just minutes after the final bell of the school week, the halls of Sherman Oaks High School were flooded with students. Most of them were far more eager to make it out the doors and into the California sunshine than they had been to get to any of their classes, but that was just the way of things. Even the most academically-minded students were ready for a break by the time Friday afternoon rolled around.

Within the veritable tide of students rushing for the doors, there was, of course, an exception.

"Hey!"

Paxton Hall-Yoshida, backpack slung all casual-cool over his shoulder, walked against the current. Not that he really noticed. Crowds always parted so obligingly wherever he went, leaving him free to consider the important issues in his life. Like: should he change up his dryland workout mix or would new music just throw him off? 

"Dude, wait up!"

He nodded at Trent but didn't stop to help him and Marcus with whatever they were doing that required vape juice, Flamin' Hot Cheetos, a whole stack of those paper straws that started disintegrating the second they went in a drink, and someone to film it all. When it inevitably went up on someone's finsta, he'd get pretty much the same experience and none of the fallout. Or clean up. 

Paxton would've kept right on walking, heading for the locker room to get changed for practice, but a sudden grip on his wrist—strong for such a small hand and how little its owner put into most kinds of physical activity—pulled him to a halt.

"Oh my God," Devi panted, chest heaving because though the student body parted for Paxton like the Red Sea for Moses, their peers were less accomodating of her efforts to chase after him. She'd been buffeted through the crowd, a lone leaf caught up in white water rapids. But even more pathetic. Leaves didn't really care if they got swept downstream; Devi really, really did. "I've been yelling at you since the student lounge! What are you, deaf?" 

Paxton's brow wrinkled, but before he could say that even if he'd heard her—and he had; there was some weird frequency to Devi's voice, and he couldn't help but pick up on it—he hadn't really thought she was calling out to him, Devi's eyes went wide and horrified. "Oh, shit. Are you? Did you hit your head during practice or something? Are traumatic brain injuries even a thing in swimming? I mean, maybe that explains Ryan Lochte. Is it permanent? I don't remember much from our unit on Helen Keller in 5th grade, but sign language can't be that hard—"

"What are you talking about?"

Cut off mid-babble by Paxton's unaffected confusion, Devi rallied admirably fast. She had plenty of practice, having often lost Paxton somewhere mid-argument either to his lack of investment in her latest outrage or her own, admittedly eclectic, sense of logical progressions. It worked out better for the both of them if he just told her when the train had gone off the tracks. "Nothing. Just, I was trying to get your attention."

"Well, you've got it. You need something?"

Whether Paxton meant for his warm grin, or the way he let his gaze dip from Devi's, to make her brain stutter to a halt and leave her flushed and remarkably quiet as it started back up again was a matter for some debate. That this was the exact effect he had on her wasn't.

Once Devi got a handle on herself, she laughed, a little breathless. "Yeah," she said, staring at him for a few seconds too long. "I mean, yes. Can I talk to you?"

"Sure. Shoot."

"Not here," she said, and then made good use of the wrist she had yet to release to pull him back through the hallways, now far emptier than they'd been as she tracked him down, and into one of the science classrooms. 

This wasn't the first time a girl had dragged Paxton into a classroom, but it was probably the first time someone else had already been in there. And on purpose, too, considering the way Devi didn't immediately launch into a fury at the sight of Ben Gross sitting at one of the tables.

Any expectations Paxton might have had for this interaction—off the top of his head, he could definitely name a few—shot down to the floor. Maybe lower. Possibly, they were in the basement.

Given those expectations had more in common with the kind of stuff he watched behind locked doors and on private browser windows than any of Devi's previous forays into broadening her makeout horizons, he shouldn't have been so surprised. She'd proven just as curious and eager to learn, though maybe less single-minded than she could get, as ever, and this was maybe the one subject Paxton was fully qualified to teach.

But those lessons had always been firmly extracurricular.

Sure, Devi would certainly thrill, and possibly kill, for just about anyone to know that she and Paxton Hall-Yoshida—yes, _that_ Paxton Hall-Yoshida—were mashing faces on the reg. However, the possibility that any school faculty member might stumble upon said face-mashing trumped the burning desire to show off to her peers. Those were the people who would one day write her recommendation letter to the admissions board of Princeton; no amount of getting felt up, even by the hottest guy she'd ever seen in real life, who had literally made her toes curl when they made out in his garage last week, was worth that risk.

Paxton had even accepted that. 

Other things about this not-quite-relationship with Devi were harder to accept. 

Namely: Ben Gross. 

That Ben Gross was the first guy to ever stir anything even resembling jealousy in Paxton was the kind of development that no one even passingly familiar with both could have seen coming. That it was over Devi Vishwakumar, whose days as Coyote Girl were beginning to fade, was just the cherry on top. 

Hovering in the doorway, Paxton tried to decide if this was going to be worth his time. He could be downing a protein bar or stretching. Or something. Not playing another round of Devi-Pong with Ben. Or maybe he was the ball, pinged from one extreme of Devi's affection to the other.

Even if Devi'd decided she need to prove how not into Gross she was today, Paxton had learned by now that she probably would feel differently in a week. And then something different a week after that, but always eventually back to where they began. Things tended to cycle with Devi. 

If Paxton were at all inclined to poetic turns of mind, he might think of it like an underwater drill in the pool. Dive in and start out strong, confident. Sure, easy strokes propelling him through the water. Inevitably, though, something would shift. The harder he pulled, the more he kicked, the more his body would beg for air, until his lungs were burning and something that was second nature turned desperate and unnecessarily difficult. Just a struggle to make it to the other side. But then, just ahead, the wall would loom, ready for him to reach out and touch. When he could finally surface for air, all that effort was gone, accomplishment and pride left in its place. 

And then, it was time to turn around and do it again.

But metaphors and figures aren't really Paxton's language. He just knew that Devi had yet to make up her goddamn mind—him or Ben or neither of them when they'd both managed to set her off—for more than a week or two at a time. Since he hadn't yet managed to convince himself to wash his hands of her mess, he could only go with the flow.

“Is this gonna take long?” Paxton asked, dumping his backpack on the ground as he sprawled in a seat across the aisle from Ben without really looking at him. There was always a double-edged sense of satisfaction when he ignored Ben, who never quite managed the same; Paxton might be able to pretend Ben Gross didn't exist, but Devi sure as hell couldn't. “‘Cause I’ve got practice in twenty.”

“No,” Devi said, taking a place at the front of the class, squarely between him and Ben and for once giving them her equal attention. "It won't take long at all, because really, what kind of teenage boy is going to pass up on this kind of opportunity?"

Five feet away, Ben slumped in his seat and crossed his arms over his chest. 

Paxton still didn't quite get Devi and Ben's whole... thing. Since he tried to think about Ben, particularly in conjunction with Devi, as little as possible, this was only natural. 

Anyone who dunked on someone as regularly and viciously as Devi eviscerated Ben Gross probably meant it. More and more, though, Paxton was starting to think, if anything, it was a sign of how much she liked him. If this suspicion arose from the fact that Devi had never said anything particularly mean to him, he hadn't yet made the conscious connection. 

"Opportunity?" he said, flat. From experience, when Devi put on that overly-upbeat, cheerful mask, some part of her knew what she was about to say was completely and utterly ridiculous.

"Yeah, a great one! Even Ben agrees."

Having realized that Ben's approval would have an adverse effect on Paxton's eventual participation in her plan, she paused, trying to find her way back to the outline she'd drawn up for this conversation. 

“I still dispute the validity of your win, David," Ben grumbled, taking advantage of her momentary lapse. "If we’d gone Oxford the way I wanted—“

“You should know by now you don't get to relitigate just because you lost, Ben," Devi shot back, all faux-sweetness. Ben scowled back, and Paxton really just didn't get it. "You agreed to Lincoln-Douglas.”

“Only because you wouldn’t let me call in a moderator or an audience.”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” Devi drawled, not sounding sorry at all. “Did you want to debate whether or not to have a threesome in front of an audience?”

Paxton, who, until now, had been drifting between ignoring Gross and Devi and getting annoyed that he’d been drawn into their… whatever, again, suddenly found himself very interested. 

“A threesome?”

Dropping her mounting annoyance with one boy to turn to the other with a, dazzling if she were asked to put a name on it, smile, Devi nodded enthusiastically.

“With both of us?” he asked, because it never hurt to make sure. Then, because while he might have failed sophomore history once, he didn’t actually miss all the digs at his intellect: “I mean, me, I get, but Gross? You know you can do better, right?”

Laughing—not that giggle that so many girls put on as they “playfully” shoved his shoulder or leaned their chests against his arm, but loud and delighted and maybe a little vicious—Devi replied, “So shady. But yes, I’m sure.”

"Okay," he said, turning the prospect over. "Why?"

Brow furrowing, Devi mouthed the question silently to herself. Honestly, she hadn't expected so much pushback—ie: any—on this proposal of hers. Sure, it was maybe a little unconventional, but it involved sex! Statistically, two teenage boys seemed like the ideal candidates to rope into unconventional sex plans. 

"Do you really need an explanation beyond, 'Because I want to'?"

"When you want to double stamp your v-card—"

"I'm not a virgin!" Devi objected, and if she was shrill, it was only because she'd told them, like, a hundred times. Because, really, what was virginity? Just some made up value attached to whether or not her hymen was intact.

(On this particular matter, Devi was a little cloudy; she might've aced Bio, and killed the unit on human anatomy, but determining whether or not her own hymen was torn wasn't covered on the final.)

"... Right."

Ben only barely smothered a snort, though he bought Devi's denial as much as Paxton did. Rather than express any of that doubt, he opted for a different tack.

"Yeah, tell us why you think this is such a great idea," Ben said, smiling invitingly. The gleam in his eye said he was not simply eager to hear Devi's reasoning laid out.

Again.

Even though Paxton had zoned them out earlier, he hadn't exactly missed the implication that she'd already full-on debated the issue with Gross and argued him to her side. The question—did it mean something that she didn't think she had to go to the same lengths for him?—didn't form quite so coherently in his own thoughts, but the suggestion of it was certainly there and certainly irritating enough to poke a hole in what was usually ironclad confidence.

"Well, I mean— I like both of you, so much." Ben and Paxton very pointedly did not look at each other, though if they had, they would have noticed their fists and jaws had clenched in uncanny reflections of the other. "And this seems like the most— Well, at least _a_ fair way..."

Devi trailed off, hoping Paxton would fill in the blanks on his own. He did, but lacking Devi's own, labyrinthine, thought processes, he couldn't be blamed for drawing incorrect conclusions based on available context clues. 

Frowning as he worked out where she was leading him, both from the effort of following the twists and turns of logic without a reliable roadmap and because he was pretty sure he wouldn't like the destination, Paxton said, "Okay... You want us to sleep with you—at the same time—so... You can figure out which of us you like more?"

"What! No!" Devi's wild gesticulation, accompanied by the frantic shaking of her head to really drive the denial home, sort of set him at ease. At least it was pretty cute. "It's not about who I like more! Again, I like both of you. A lot. Like, too much, probably. But you've both been surprisingly chill about all of this. So maybe it'd be chill if we all... Y'know."

The silence that followed was no less tense than it'd been before, though it was briefer.

"So you want to sleep with us—at the same time," Paxton said, not to belabor the point but because he was still wrapping his mind around it, "—as a reward? For not making you choose?"

"No! I mean— That's not— Ben! Don't you have anything to say?"

Ben's expression was all smug superiority. "Nope. I'm totally fine with the way this is going."

He was, in fact, if only because he knew how much Devi loved having holes poked in her proposals. Sure, Paxton wasn't launching missile strikes at the logical fallacies and shoddy evidence in her case the way Ben might, but his inability to take up the threads of what Devi had called "a totally obvious solution" was just as effective. At this rate, Ben wouldn't have to do anything to talk Devi out of this venture. And Devi really had to be talked out of this venture. The likelihood of a side-by-side comparison of him and Paxton, in almost any capacity that didn't involve grades or SAT scores, coming out in Ben's favor felt subterranean.

"You agreed to a threesome!" Devi practically screeched, hands just itching for something to throw at his stupid, smug, adorable face. Okay, maybe she'd make sure to miss. 

"I conceded a debate—a debate for which you gave me no time to prepare—on the subject."

"That's basically the same thing!"

Ben rolled his eyes but didn't deny that if things had gone the other way, he would've taken it as read that she was now obligated—because the sanctity of debate-based contracts was ironclad—to agree with him.

"So, uh, do you guys actually need me here?"

As one, Devi and Ben turned to Paxton. Supremely unimpressed, he gave them the stare of a guy far too accustomed to the Gross and Vishwakumar Show for all he'd never gotten into it. Sue him if he liked his entertainment with explosions that involved dynamite and shrapnel and big balls of fire, not suburban renditions of the dozens and shredded egos. The big ball of fire had only been once, when they'd had to partner together for Chemistry, and Paxton hadn't even been there to see it.

Laughing awkwardly, which her bright grin did little to disguise, Devi shifted her weight from foot to foot. This really was not going the way she'd planned it. Everyone knew a threesome was the only woke conclusion to a love triangle. Which wasn't why Devi suggested it, of course, but at this rate, she'd have to throw that into the ring to see if it was any more convincing than her other arguments.

"Well," she said, not ready to resort to her last line of defense, "I mean, it wouldn't really be a threesome without three of us."

Paxton sighed and scooped up his backpack as he rolled to his feet, one fluid motion. He'd gotten so used to the way his every move seemed to attract attention—gazes trailing down his chest, jaws going slack as he walked by, touches that should be innocent lingering too long—for it to really register anymore. Except when it came to Devi; he always seemed to notice what effect he had on her. Even in the middle of walking out on her threesome proposal, she couldn't help but bite her lip and stare.

"Listen," he said. "I'm not sure how much you've really thought this through."

"You think _I_ haven't thought things through?" she demanded, incensed as only doubts cast on her critical thinking abilities could make her. "I made Ben fucking debate me on the issue! How much more should I be thinking about this?"

"I mean," Ben said, leadingly. Devi turned her irate attention on him, just daring him to continue. Naturally, he rose to the bait. "How much did you really consider the negative? If you'd let me actually prepare some arguments—"

"You lost, Gross. Get over it. You even get a consolation prize: sleeping with me."

"You know you just called sex with you a consolation, right? And implied sex with me is the grand prize?"

"I think that's sex with _me_ , dude," Paxton observed dryly. 

Ben's mouth twisted sourly, and then he opened it to turn his not inconsiderable wit on Paxton. Before he had his chance to lay into the pretty boy who seemed to entrance Devi with little more than a smirk and a peek at those stupid v-muscles on his hips, though, he was cut short.

"Jesus! You know what? Fine!" Devi cried, flinging herself into motion and already two steps towards the door. If these two idiots were too dense to pick up what she was laying down, then fuck them. Figuratively. Because it certainly wasn't going to happen literally at this pace. "If you guys don't want to fuck me, just say so!"

In the kind of sync that boded well—or really, really badly—for what they were going to do Ben and Paxton locked eyes. In remarkably short order, they came to a silent agreement. 

"No," Ben said, tender in a way really only Devi got to hear until now. 

"That's not it," Paxton agreed, loathe as he was to admit Ben had a point.

Devi froze, but without the fury she'd just been radiating. Almost like she'd just been waiting for them to stop her, or at least very prepared for the possibility. Slowly, she turned. "So you _do_ want to fuck me?"

Somehow, in spite of everything she put them through on a semi-regular basis, they both nodded. 

Lighting up, triumph and an ego boost making her practically glow, she chirped, "Great! Then let's get started!"

Spinning on her heel, Devi headed for the door once more, a spring in her step. 

Once more uncannily in sync, Ben and Paxton traded looks. What either of them gleaned from that moment of connection was to be, by another silent agreement, never spoken of. Ben was the first to break, shadowing Devi's steps out of the classroom and into the hall. 

Paxton shoved his hands in his pockets and stared up at the ceiling for a long moment. This was the perfect opportunity to dip. _Thanks, I guess, but no,_ he could say whenever Devi tracked him down. _Find someone else to buffer your weird, bloodthirsty flirting with Gross_. _I've got practice._ Coach was definitely gonna yell at him if he skipped out.

And yet...

Smiling to himself, he shook his head and followed them out the door. Coach could yell all he wanted. Paxton had a feeling this was going to be worth it. 


End file.
